AD6DM

Today marks the day I took the final for ARRL’s EC-001: Emergency Communications Basic/Level 1 course. It’s a 9 week course that I started in November and covers a wide range of EMCOMM topics: From the organizational structure of emergency communicator groups to traffic net etiquette to digital modes to message handling to deployment preparation and expectations. It is designed for those who want to volunteer in ARES or another emergency communications group.

If you’re at all into antennas aside from your handheld rubber duck antenna, you should try to get an antenna analyzer. Here I am using a RigExpert AA-600: https://youtu.be/cNzKpTXH5Ak Before using this device, I would just go by the radio’s SWR reading (a poor display of SWR “bars”) to determine if I was close to resonance. The quad-band vertical antenna I have supposedly works with 10m, 6m, 2m, and 40cm. I never had much success with adjusting the end tip of the antenna for 10m until I started evaluating readings using the AA-600. My target frequency was 28.400 MHz for the LARC weekly 10m net, and 28.457 MHz for the SDARC weekly 10m net. Both frequencies had such high SWR that I could never get out very far. Turns out I was lengthening/shortening the adjustment the opposite way I thought, so no wonder I had no success. I also found that the counterpoise placement has a huge effect on SWR readings, it’s very finicky.

I found a load of RTTY on 80m band on Sunday night (1/7/2018). I tuned to 3580 kHz and found a particularly strong signal, so I hooked up my USB soundcard to my laptop, fired up fldigi and made attempts to reply, but I guess my QRP setup didn’t get heard in all the pileup chatter. Turns out, January 6-7 was “ARRL RTTY Roundup”, a nationwide contest to make contacts in the digital format, so it was easy to catch the conversations on almost all HF bands. I found the CQ’s in this format a bit odd, and didn’t really know how to format my responses or how to call CQ myself. I saw things like: TEST N6JJ N6JJ CQ (not real callsign), or CQ RU N6JK CQ. What? I went with the way I new how to call CQ, which was: CQ CQ DE AD6DM PSE K. (meaning: Calling any station from AD6DM please reply). No replies. There were a lot of transmissions like: W7KJ N6JK 599 5NN TU 73. I took these to mean an acknowledgement, a signal report, thank you, best regards. RTTY is a very quick format. It’s like a drive-by greeting that is over before you know it. It’s probably how hams did contest contact-gathering before the more modern semi-automated FT8 format. In any case, I want to get out there on RTTY and give it more of a try.